After all the films, documentaries and television programs about the Holocaust that I had seen the past three decades, I came to believe that I had witnessed all the visual imagery available from that horrible period.
Then, last week, I saw Lisa Lewenz's "A Letter Without Words," one of the most lovely, eloquent and touching films about family, memory and identity that I have ever seen. And, by the way, it is loaded with images none of us have ever seen of Hitler's rise and anti-Semitism. They were photographed by Lewenz's grandmother, Ella Lewenz, and stored in an attic in Baltimore until Lewenz found them in 1981.
"A Letter Without Words" is a triumph on several levels. A member of a prominent German-Jewish family, Ella Lewenz started making home movies shortly after World War I. The early footage shows a life filled with good times, a keen sense of German nationalism and good friends, including the likes of Albert Einstein. That's how prominent the Lewenz family was.
But things started to change in 1933, when Hitler came to power. Ella, though still rich, was a 49-year-old widow with six children. The Nazis, meanwhile, passed censorship laws that made it a crime to film the sorts of things Ella had been filming.
But that didn't stop Ella, and the images she left us are stunning: avenues choked with Nazi bunting flying like the banners outside museums in New York, and signs everywhere saying such things as "No Jews" and "An End to Jews."
Such ugliness is intercut with beautiful flower arrangements in a German park where Jews are allowed to sit only on yellow benches in Hitler's Germany.
Lewenz took the footage her late grandmother shot -- some of the earliest color film ever -- and started a collaboration with it. She went to Berlin and other sites in Germany and filmed the same locations from the same points of view as her grandmother.
Sometimes, she even had another camera filming her as she simultaneously filmed and watched on a small screen mounted on her camera the images that her grandmother had filmed. It is a marvelous visual representation of the filmmaker's technique.
In the end, Lewenz created a fascinating inter-generational narrative of two women discovering in parallel ways what it means to be a Jew.
Lewenz grew up an Episcopalian who didn't find out about her Jewish roots until she was 13. Ella and her circle clearly thought of themselves as Germans as much as Jews until Hitler made that impossible.
I saw "A Letter Without Words" on a television screen, because it will have its premiere on PBS (MPT locally) April 5. But you can see it on a big screen Tuesday at 7: 30 p.m. in a one-time showing at the Senator Theatre.
The unveiling of a block in front of the theater to celebrate the film and the effort of Ella and Lisa Lewenz will be held at 7: 10 p.m. Tickets are $10. Call 410-323-1989 for information.
Either way, at the Senator or later on PBS, "A Letter Without Words" is not to be missed.
Cassavetes double bill
John Cassavetes fans won't want to miss the rarely screened "Killing of a Chinese Bookie" (1976), in which Ben Gazzara stars as a Los Angeles nightclub owner who crosses paths with some ruthless Asian gangsters. "Bookie" is pure Cassavetes, a quiet tour de force for Gazzara and a much-overlooked example of contemporary film noir.
It's a must-see for aficionados, especially with "A Woman Under the Influence" (1974), in which Gena Rowlands plays a housewife whose nervous breakdown brings into sharper clarity the absurdities of the society around her.
The Cassavetes double feature will unspool at the Orpheum in Fells Point starting Monday.
Ann Hornaday
On screens this weekend
The Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis Inc. will present Jane Campion's "Portrait of a Lady," the adaptation of the Henry James novel starring Nicole Kidman, tonight at 7: 30. Psychoanalyst Charles Wasserman, M.D., will discuss the film. The movie will be shown at the Baltimore Museum of Art at Charles and 31st streets. Tickets may be purchased for $35 ($30 for BMA members and $15 for students) at the BMA box office during museum hours and beginning one hour prior to the screening. Tickets may also be charged by calling the BMA box office at 410-235-0100. For more information, call 410-792-6060.
The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration Committee will show John Edgington's documentary "Mumia: A Case for Reasonable Doubt?" (1997) tonight at 7: 30 p.m. The film examines the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was sentenced to death for killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1982. Abu-Jamal's case has since raised questions about racism, police corruption and the criminal justice system. "Mumia" will be shown at the American Friends Service Committee, 4806 York Road. Doors open at 7 p.m. Admission is free.
The Enoch Pratt Free Library's "American Command" series continues Sunday with a screening of "Eisenhower," a documentary written and produced by Adriana Bosch that originally aired on PBS as part of the "American Experience" series. Film historian Thomas Cripps will lead the discussion after the screening. "Eisenhower" will be shown at 2 p.m. in the Wheeler Auditorium at the Central Library, 400 Cathedral St.
The final movie of the winter series of Cinema Sundays at the Charles will be Tony Goldwyn's "A Walk on the Moon." The drama, set in the 1960s, stars Diane Lane as a young wife and mother whose brush with the counterculture threatens to turn her world upside down. Liev Schreiber and Viggo Mortensen co-star. "A Walk on the Moon" will be shown Sunday at the Charles Theatre at 10: 30 a.m. Walk-up tickets will be available for $15 when the doors open at 9: 45 a.m. For more information, call 410-727-3464.
Ann Hornaday
Pub Date: 3/26/99